[michrassena]

I think essentially that's what this boils down to. Color slide film of the time, like Kodachrome, had a narrow range of exposure. I see no reason to believe this was anything but a technical limitation. A slide film with more stops of exposure would have been a huge commercial success.

Given that narrow range, you could either expose for lighter or darker skin tones. And this is where institutional racism creeps in. In a group where everyone had similar skin tones, you wouldn't face an issue exposing the film properly. But where there was a variety, it was commonplace to treat exposing for the lighter skin tones as more important. The group with darker skin was treated as if it didn't matter, or mattered far less.

I think this is the key idea. Even rejecting the idea that Kodak and other film companies made the choice to exclude a group of people, they created a default, an inertia, which had to worked against to be equitable. My mind keeps coming back to the Pareto principle. In pursuing the 80% of customers might be the wealthier group, the easier to convert, the most likely to use your product, is it often the same %20 who are left out and don't they matter?

[dagmx]

It's not just about exposure though. It was about color reproduction too.

[michrassena]

That's a fair criticism. You could make the case that the film companies didn't care enough to test the film's color reproduction for anything but caucasian skin tones, or didn't put the research dollars into fixing the problem. At the root of that would be racism.

[dagmx]

I like the term this presentation took for situations like this with "anti racist research" https://youtu.be/ROuE8xYLpX8

Like you said, at the root of that is racism, but the presentation frames it in an interesting way. Not everyone who takes part in this research is racist, but they're the products of racism in society.

So color not being accurately reproduced could either be a direct product of racist people or the result of people in a society that doesn't value everyone equally.

But I like the wording of "anti racist research" because it pushes the onus to actively trying to analyze if things are fair, rather than assuming they are. Even people who aren't actively racist can benefit their research from trying to push past the biases inherent in society that permiates everything

[Aloha]

Exposure and color registration are closely coupled on color film, particularly Kodachrome.